The Sci-Hub Website Had Security Certificates Revoked By Comodo

• Sci-Hub has lost control of several security certificates preventing users from accessing it.
• This website is known as the "Pirate Bay of Science".
• After losing in the Court of Law from ACS, Sci-Hub is struggling to remain on the Web.

A largest certification authority company on the web, Comodo CA, has revoked four security certificates of the Sci-Hub website for several of its domains. Comodo CA stated that this is a result of the court order which compelled the company to take measures.

Sci-Hub is a website commonly known as the "Pirate Bay for Science". The name suits well since here users can find unlicensed content for free regarding millions of academic articles and published papers. And while on Pirate Bay you can find almost anything you want, on Sci-Hub you can find only the latest scientific research material. Naturally, the copyright holders, which are mostly scientists and the institutions they work in, want to do something to protect their licensed work. This is the reason why Sci-Hub and its founder Alexandra Elbakyan, are under constant attacks for several years now. And even though they were targeted by some publishing giants like the "Elsevier", the biggest blow seems to be coming from the American Chemical Society (ACS).

ACS has been starting a series of legal actions against Sci-Hub lately which culminated in the court awarding the ACS $4.8 million in copyright infringement damages. In addition to that, ACS was also granted a broad injunction which involved using third-party services like domain registries, search engines and hosting companies to remove Sci-Hub from the internet. This caused Sci-Hub to change internet domains fast and jump from one to another as they were censored by these third-party services. The latest action that is a direct result of this broad injunction was the court order for Comodo CA to revoke four security certificates from different domains like "Sci-Hub.hk" and "Sci-Hub.nz".

Readers who try to enter these domains would receive an error called "NET::ERR_CERT_REVOKED" and a message saying that the connection is not private nor safe to use. As Torrent Freak confirmed, Comodo CA stated they are responding to the court order to revoke these security certificates from any Sci-Hub domains. Currently, Sci-Hub operates on different domains, of which some are still active thanks to certificates issued by "Let's Encrypt", a free and open certificate authority service. Readers can check out the official list of active Sci-Hub's domains on Wikipedia. How long will these domains stay active, remains to be seen.